Researchers use machine learning tools to reveal how memories are coded in the brain | Mind & Brain - Science Daily

NUS researchers have made a breakthrough in the field of cognitive computational neuroscience, by discovering a key aspect of how the brain encodes short-term memories, notes Science Daily.

These findings indicate that stable short-term memory information exists within a population of neurons with dynamic activity.
Photo: National University of Singapore

The researchers working in The N.1 Institute for Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS), led by Assistant Professor Camilo Libedinsky from the Department of Psychology at NUS, and Senior Lecturer Shih-Cheng Yen from the Innovation and Design Programme in the Faculty of Engineering at NUS, discovered that a population of neurons in the brain's frontal lobe contain stable short-term memory information within dynamically-changing neural activity.

This discovery may have far-reaching consequences in understanding how organisms have the ability to perform multiple mental operations simultaneously, such as remembering, paying attention and making a decision, using a brain of limited size.
The results of this study were published in the journal Nature Communications on 1 November 2019...

The researchers are currently extending these studies to explore of how multiple brain regions interact with each other with the objective of transferring and processing different types of information.
Read more... 

Additional resources  
Journal Reference:

1. Aishwarya Parthasarathy, Cheng Tang, Roger Herikstad, Loong Fah Cheong, Shih-Cheng Yen, Camilo Libedinsky. Time-invariant working memory representations in the presence of code-morphing in the lateral prefrontal cortex. Nature Communications, 2019; 10 (1)  
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-12841-y 

Source: Science Daily